[Air-L] CFP: Workshop on cultural representations of machine vision - Bergen, 15-17 August

[Jill Walker Rettberg]

Call for submissions:
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MACHINE VISION: AN EXPERIMENTAL MIXED METHODS WORKSHOP

Location: Bergen, Norway
Workshop dates: 15-17 August 2022
Proposals due 15 June

The ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life invites submissions to a workshop to be held at Solstrand Hotel near Bergen, Norway, on 15-17 August 2022. The workshop will combine qualitative close readings/case studies of machine vision in art, fiction, games and social media, with data analysis of the project’s dataset on machine vision in 500 creative works (see references below).

WHO IS THIS FOR:
The interdisciplinary workshop is for scholars at all levels from graduate students to full professors. We welcome participants from the humanities and social sciences as well as those with a background in data science or similar and an interest in interdisciplinary collaborations. The project will cover the cost of hotel and board for the workshop, and a limited number of travel stipends may be available.

TOPIC
As visual technologies are increasingly combined with machine learning to interpret and generate images, societies around the globe face practical and ethical questions about how these new possibilities should be evaluated, implemented and governed as they impact people’s everyday life. With their anticipatory and speculative potential, cultural representations of machine vision play a key role in answering these questions.

Our premise is that cultural production – including literature, art, cinema, video games, science fiction, memes, fandom and more – is a rich source for understanding the impact of machine vision technologies on society, as well as their potential future trajectory. What can we learn from how machine vision is represented, applied and discussed in digital art, video games, novels, movies, TV-series, fan fiction, electronic literature, popular culture, social media content and other aesthetically or culturally expressive genres?

QUALITATIVE INTERPRETATION AND/OR DATA ANALYSIS
Seeking to experiment with mixed methods approaches, this workshop will ask participants to explore both qualitative interpretations and quantitative analyses of machine vision in art, games, narratives and more, based on the dataset Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives, which documents how machine vision is portrayed in 500 cultural works. The dataset is available as a set of .csv files and can be also browsed using a more human-friendly interface at http://machine-vision.no.
Participants are invited to either present work-in-progress towards individually or co-authored papers on the topic of machine vision and its cultural representation, or to pitch and discuss strategies for analysing the dataset in collaboration with other workshop participants. In either case, workshop hours will be divided between short presentations, feedback sessions, and individual or collaborative data analysis and/or writing. The workshop has two goals: generating new research from the project’s dataset, and experiment with a mixed method approach to digital humanities data. A goal of the workshop is to develop research that combines qualitative methods with data science and data analysis, and to strengthen interactions between researchers using different methods.
The workshop will be held at Solstrand Hotel, with delicious meals, beautiful fjord views, plenty of nooks and crannies for writing and group work, and indoor and outdoor bathing opportunities.
Participants will be invited to submit papers developed in the workshop to a special journal issue that is currently under development.

HOW TO APPLY
Please send an email to jill.walker.rettberg at uib.no by June 15, 2022 with a few sentences about your background and either a 250-word abstract for the paper you would like to develop at the workshop, or an idea for how you’d like to work with the dataset and a short explanation of why you’re interested in participating in the workshop. We are also open to participants who would like to analyse other relevant datasets or materials, or who have general skills in data science and would like experience applying humanities approaches to digital methods. Travel scholarships may be available for a limited number of applicants.

REFERENCES
The dataset is available on DataverseNO:

Rettberg JW, Kronman L, Solberg R, et al. (2022) A Dataset Documenting Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives. DataverseNO. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18710/2G0XKN.

A data paper describing the dataset is also available:

Rettberg JW, Kronman L, Solberg R, et al. (2022) Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives: Documentation of a Dataset. Data in Brief. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108319.

TENTATIVE WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

August 15
09:00-09:45        Bus from Muséplass at the University of Bergen to Solstrand
10:00-12:00        Welcome, introductions, presentation about the project
                                Presentations and discussion start
12:00-13:00        Lunch
13:00-17:00        Presentations and discussion continue
                                (or smaller groups?)
20:00-                   Dinner

August 16
09:00-12:00        Group and individual work (writing or data analysis)
12:00-13:00        Lunch
13:00-17:00        Group and individual work (writing or data analysis)
20:00-                   Dinner

August 17
09:00-12:30        Finish up – short presentations of what we did
                                Discuss methods, connections between projects
12:30-13:30        Lunch
14:00-14:45        Bus back to Bergen

FUNDING
The workshop is funded by the University of Bergen and the project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 771800).